Off The Grid
New Love X Stereo EP released October 26
lovexstereo.com
Seoul, October 26 2012 – Since the release of debut demo album Buzzin' in December 2011, Love X Stereo has played a number of major concerts. Highlights included opening for Asobi Seksu's May 2012 Korean gig, Jisan Valley Rock festival in July, RockDo Festival in September and opening for The KDMS Korea concert in October.
Love X Stereo aims to create a mysterious but forceful sound, demonstrating outstanding talent in lyric writing, composition, arrangement, recording, mixing and producing.
At live gigs in particular, Love X Stereo's drive to fill venues to bursting point borders on obsession. The band is currently enjoying a hotter reaction from expatriate foreigners in Korea than from Koreans themselves – based on this international potential, it is planning its debut on the world stage.
Love X Stereo's music is an extraordinary fusion of 1990s alternative, pop and punk rock sentiment with electronic elements, aimed at creating totally new and original sounds. This is the result of the band's ongoing efforts to produce a seemingly familiar yet novel, seemingly simple yet complex, fuller-than-full sound.
If Love X Stereo's earlier demo album, Buzzin', was something approaching an attempt at new dance music with shades of the 1980s and 90s, new EP Off the Grid goes a step further, showing far greater depth not only in melody lines but also instrumental composition.
As its title suggests, the first track on the album, “Soul City (Seoul City),” is a gloves-off expression of the band's true feelings about its native city. The song is an attempt to melt contemporary Seoul, with all its ambivalent charm, into the lyrics and melody of the song. “Soul City (Seoul City)” ends on a majestic, psychedelic note, as if reflecting the complex civilizational world of this ancient capital.
Track 2, “Chain Reaction,” is the most recent on the EP and sounds every bit as fresh as it is new. A mysterious but rhythmical mood is sustained from beginning to end, based on the message that all things – you and I, life and death, humans and the universe – affect each other.
The third and final track, “Storm,” has been around relatively longer than others on the EP. Created in response to the shock of the tsunami that hit Japan in March 2011, it has been repeatedly edited and re-edited to achieve solid composition and a forceful sound. Tinged with a whiff of nostalgia for 1990s electronica, “Storm” delivers the most powerful sound among the three tracks on the album.
As the album's title, Off The Grid, suggests, this is EP is a must-have for all fans wanting a taste of Love X Stereo's unique, future-oriented sound that pushes its way out of all conventional orbits and heads off on a trajectory all of its own, into the depths of space.
[TRACKS]
1. SOUL CITY
2. CHAIN REACTION
3. STORM
released 26 October 2012
- Contributors -
ANNIE: vocals, synthesizer, percussions
TOBY: guitars, producer
SOL: bass